Woe to you, vain child of clay! You with jewels overdone, Her have robbed who had but one No words of mine could add to the force and eloquence of this pleading-I had almost said of this fulmination. What I would add, should go rather in mitigation of the crime imputed to the courtly beauty. Selfish as vanity is-dangerous as leading to all the sins that follow upon frivolity, I have a true faith in the general kindliness and the general good training of our young countrywomen, whether of the village green, or of the palace circle. I do not believe that any English lady would knowingly purchase a splendid dress at the cost of health to the artificer. Let them once think-let them once be brought to think whether they can reasonably expect their orders to be executed within a given time, and what may be the amount of suffering caused by such execution, and, my life upon it, our Lady Maudes would give up their furbelows, and their embroideries, and trust to their native charms of grace and modesty to win as much admiration as they know what to do with. But then they must be taught to think; and in all matters of humanity, they could hardly find finer precepts than in the poems of Miss Day. These lady poets are all my friends: I add yet another, personally a stranger, but still a friend, to the list-Mrs. Robert Dering. CHURCH SERVICES. The chimes from yonder steeple Ring merrily and loud, And groups of eager people Toward their music crowd. Before the altar's railing A bride and bridegroom stand, And every ear is trying, The soft "I will" is spoken, A glance as soft exchanged,That vow shall ne'er be broken, Nor those fond hearts estranged. Another train advances No bridal train is this, With youthful pride and pleasure Their babe is now receiving Sweet babe! this world is hollow, Another train is wending Within the church its way, While prayers are still ascending For blessings on that day. But here no bride is blushing; Bright dawns the bridal morning; A blight may soon be falling And then the day of sorrow Than that which saw our birth. The sweetness and melody of these stanzas, as well as their pervading holiness, render them no unfitting conclusion to this little garland of verses, varying in manner, but of which we may truly say that they are in tone and feeling most English and most feminine. XXIII. CAVALIER POETS. RICHARD LOVELACE, ROGER L'ESTRANGE, THE MARQUIS OF MONTROSE. If there be one thing more than another in the nice balance of tastes and prejudices (for I do not speak here of principles) which inclines us now to the elegance of Charles, now to the strength of Cromwell-which disgusts us alternately with the license of the Cavaliers and the fanaticism of the Roundheads; it would be the melancholy ruin of cast-down castles and plundered shrines, that meet our eyes all over our fair land,. and nowhere in greater profusion than in this district, lying as it does in the very midst of some of the most celebrated battles of the Civil Wars. To say nothing of the siege of Reading, which more even than the vandalism of the Reformation completed the destruction of that noble abbey, the third in rank and size in England, with its magnificent church, its cloisters, and its halls, covering thirty acres of buildings—and such buildings! within the outer courts; -to say nothing of that most reckless barbarity just at our door —we in our little village of Aberleigh lie between Basing-House to the south, whose desperately defended walls offer little more now than a mere site—and Donnington to the west, where the ruined Gate towers upon the hill alone remain of that strong fortress, which overlooked the well-contested field of Newbury-and Chalgrove to the north, where the reaper as he binds his sheaf, still pauses to tell you the very place where Hampden fell; every spot has its history! Look at a wooden spire, and your companion shakes his head, and says that it has been so ever since the Cavaliers were blown up in the church-tower! Ask the history of a crumbling wall, and the answer is pretty sure to be, Cromwell! That his Highness the Lord Protector did leave what an accom * garden on a high eminence, overhanging one of the finest bends of the great river. A woody lane leads from the church to the bottom of the chalk-cliff, one side of which stands out from the road below, like a promontory, surmounted by the laurel hedges and flowery arbors of the vicarage-garden, and crested by a noble cedar of Lebanon. This is Shiplake church, famed far and near for its magnificent oak carving, and the rich painted glass of its windows, collected, long before such adornments were fashionable, by the fine taste of the late vicar, and therefore filled with the very choicest specimens of medieval art, chiefly obtained from the remains of the celebrated Abbey of St. Bertin, near St. Omers, sacked during the first French Revolution. In this church Alfred Tennyson was married. Blessings be upon him! I never saw the great Poet in my life, but thousands who never may have seen him either, but who owe to his poetry the purest and richest intellectual enjoyment, will echo and re-echo the benison. A little way farther, and a turn to the left leads to another spot consecrated by genius-Woodcot, where Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton passed the earlier years of his married life, and wrote several of his most powerful novels. I have always thought that the scenery of Paul Clifford caught some of its tone from that wild and beautiful country, for wild and beautiful it is. The terrace in the grounds commands a most extensive prospect; and beneath a clump of trees on the common behind the house, is the only spot where on a clear day Windsor may be seen on one side, and Oxford on the other-looking almost like the domes and towers and pinnacles that sometimes appear in the clouds-a fairy picture that the next breeze may waft away! This beautiful residence stands so high, that one of its former possessors, Admiral Fraser (grandfather to that dear friend of mine who is the present owner) could discover Woodcot Clump from the mast of his own ship at Spithead, a distance of sixty miles. Wyfold's Court, another pretty place a little farther on, which also belonged once to a most dear friend, possesses the finest Wych-elms in England. Artists come from far and near to paint these stately trees, whose down-dropping branches and magnificent height are at once so graceful and so rich. They are said always to indicate ecclesiastical possession, but no trace of such dependency is to be found in the title-deeds, or in the |